Pieter de Hooch

De Hooch or De Hoogh, Pieter:

see Hooch, Pieter deHooch or Hoogh, Pieter de, b. c.1629, d. after 1677, Dutch genre painter. He worked in Delft, Leiden, and Amsterdam, painting intimate interiors that may have been influenced by those of Vermeer......Click the link for more information..

Hooch or Hoogh, Pieter de

(both: pē`tər də hōkh), b. c.1629, d. after 1677, Dutch genre painter. He worked in Delft, Leiden, and Amsterdam, painting intimate interiors that may have been influenced by those of Vermeer. Usually he preferred to paint rooms opening into other rooms or to the outdoors, intriguing the imagination with half-seen vistas, and displaying his ability to handle complicated lighting effects. His warm tone and subtle colors show Rembrandt's influence. De Hooch repeated his basic compositions many times, so that his later works are static and less interesting. One of his finest paintings is Courtyard of a Dutch House (National Gall., London). His works are housed in many European museums, and the Metropolitan Museum has seven.

Hooch, Pieter de

Hooch studied with C. Berchem in Haarlem from roughly 1646 to 1649. From 1654 he worked in Delft, where he became a member of the painters’ guild in 1655. He worked in Amsterdam in the 1660’s. Hooch was influenced by the Haarlem genre painters of F. Hals’ circle and, later, by J. Vermeer and C. Fabritius. He painted scenes from burgher life, primarily the hustle and bustle of the housewife. Hooch strove for poetic spirituality in his depictions of domestic surroundings and sunlit interiors and courtyards. Examples of his work are A Maid With a Child in a Court (1658, National Gallery, London), The Spinner (c. 1658, Buckingham Palace, London), A Woman and Her Maid (c. 1660, Hermitage, Leningrad), and A Mother Beside a Cradle (c. 1660, Picture Gallery, Berlin-Dahlem). Warm golden tones enriched with spots of pure color dominated Hooch’s mature palette. Increased superficiality of images characterized the artist’s late period.

In Dutch painting only Caspar Netscher captured better, and was more captivated by, small children than Pieter de Hooch, who left seven children, although his philoprogenitiveness can scarcely have eased the lifelong poverty in which he died in an Amsterdam asylum.

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